Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#71

Post by libdjml » Sat, Mar 31, 2018, 10:24 PM UTC

mabbo wrote: post #31

Huh. So now I'm starting to think: what if I purposely recorded thousands and thousands of meaningless video? None of my friends would ever see them since I never published them, but Facebook would use up hard drive space storing them. What if a lot of people did that? Suddenly Facebook's cost for hanging onto all these videos would become quite high with no value in doing so. Anyone feel like making a website to hel…

The scale you’d need to achieve to have even the most minor effect on facebooks vast infrastructure would be enormous.

I feel the effort you and countless opt-in people would expend could be redirected to much more fruitful efforts. Convincing people to delete their profiles, for example.

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#72

Post by procinct » Sat, Mar 31, 2018, 10:25 PM UTC

WovenTales wrote: post #33

The most unsettling part is in Facebook's response: “We’ve heard that when accessing their information from our Download Your Information tool, some people are seeing their old videos that do not appear on their profile or Activity Log. We are investigating.” Who wants to bet against their investigation being “how to keep users from seeing it.” Anyone?

Great idea! I'll make an FB app for that ;)

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#73

Post by throwaway2016a » Sat, Mar 31, 2018, 10:25 PM UTC

dna_polymerase wrote: post #61

throwaway2016a wrote: post #53

This (and the GDPR - even though my company is in the US) are why I now tell the developers on my team to not collect info unless they have a definitive use case as to why to store it. And make sure to delete delete data as soon as it is no longer needed. It helps that my business doesn't monetize via advertising. My guess is what actually happened here is that they had a use case to store it for a few hours or so (i…

> I can't imagine this being intentionally. Even if I try to consider malicious use cases I can't think of any where it would be beneficial for Facebook to actually store this data besides being too lazy to clean it up. Nope. They wrote a routine that makes the video invisible to the actual user but refrained from deleting it right away. That is intentional.

> That is intentional.

It's funny you are so sure of this.

And you essentially just called me wrong without providing a use case. My statement was I couldn't think of a use case for them to do this intentionally and your statement does nothing to disprove that.

Hiding a video can and probably is just an "UPDATE videos SET visible=0 WHERE id=123" And it is extremely common to soft delete things for hard delete later in case the user made a mistake or law enforcement requests it or any number of reasons.

Especially in large distributed systems where things often need to happen asynchronously.

Not permanently deleting a soft delete file is not necessary intentional. Anyone who has ever worked on a large software project knows about backlog stories (say, hypothetically, "free up space from soft deleted videos") not being done for years because other priorities keep pre-empting them.

Similar reason when writing in a garbage collected programming language the memory isn't freed immediately.

Does that mean it was unintentional? Not necessarily but it certainly is plausible that it was unintentional.

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#74

Post by adventured » Sat, Mar 31, 2018, 10:28 PM UTC

multibit wrote: post #55

thinkingemote wrote: post #19

Just an anecdote. I had a day set aside to purging my Facebook entries a year or two back. I manually deleted comments and posts. Of course there was too many to do and it was very boring so I only spent a couple of hours at it. But that's nots what's interesting. What happened was that I got a huge uptake of people commenting on some old post I made, like a profile picture change. I think Facebook saw I was purging…

Is there not a way to delete all posts and comments at once?

I don't believe so, at least not in the recent past. I purged my FB of all content about 18 months ago, and had to do it manually. Took several hours spread across a few weeks, whenever I could force myself to spend the time on it. For whatever reason I kept finding posts/comments for a few weeks after that; I'd go back to make sure I got everything, scouring the timelines, and there'd be something I missed somehow, quite bizarre.

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#75

Post by sverige » Sat, Mar 31, 2018, 10:30 PM UTC

multibit wrote: post #55

thinkingemote wrote: post #19

Just an anecdote. I had a day set aside to purging my Facebook entries a year or two back. I manually deleted comments and posts. Of course there was too many to do and it was very boring so I only spent a couple of hours at it. But that's nots what's interesting. What happened was that I got a huge uptake of people commenting on some old post I made, like a profile picture change. I think Facebook saw I was purging…

Is there not a way to delete all posts and comments at once?

I've never had a Facebook account, but friends have told me that no, there is not. That would go against their user and content retention models, I'm sure. It makes sense that Facebook would make it as difficult, tedious, and painful as possible to delete content from their platform.

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#76

Post by radicaldreamer » Sat, Mar 31, 2018, 10:30 PM UTC

I imagine that the data in those downloads is a fraction of all the data Facebook collects. It seems that they disclose only what is required based on local laws, so it's unlikely they will ever disclose derived data unless forced to (for example, the location data they collect and combine to figure out which people were present at the same party etc.)

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#77

Post by craigvn » Sat, Mar 31, 2018, 10:32 PM UTC

This is no surprise, virtual delete is common design pattern.

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#78

Post by demxzy » Sat, Mar 31, 2018, 10:33 PM UTC

halukakin wrote: post #46

I don't think facebook really deletes any data. You deleting a comment or a picture pretty much means: isvisible=false;

More like visible=false;

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#79

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Mar 31, 2018, 10:35 PM UTC

pdkl95 wrote: post #45

guessmyname wrote: post #8

This reminds me of the long conversations that I used to have with family members and friends several years ago. With their continuous requests to create my own Facebook profile so I can keep in contact with them and with their activities as well as to share my whereabouts. I always used the same argument to reject these suggestions — "I don't want Facebook to have too much data about me, more than the data that you…

> expecting a non-tech-savvy person to understand how data moves around the Internet Then we - the people that do have the necessary technical knowledge - have a duty to teach them what they need to know. This isn't necessarily "how data moves on the internet". Yes, this can be difficult and tedious, but understanding the risk profile for data/networks is increasingly important as networks become involved in everythi…

[deleted]

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#80

Post by dpwm » Sat, Mar 31, 2018, 10:37 PM UTC

sverige wrote: post #62

narrator wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always tell people to treat Facebook as if every person you ever meet will be able to see it. It's more or less my public persona. Twitter is more anonymous.

> Twitter is more anonymous. How did you arrive at that conclusion? I assume Twitter retains everything as well (even "deleted" tweets) and it's all associated with an email address. Or did you mean it in the sense that far fewer people have a Twitter account?

I used to believe Twitter was better. But once you're above a certain number of active (i.e. publicly retweeting) followers there's a pretty high chance that your tweets will end up in the feed that is used to generate the twitter stream archives:

https://archive.org/details/twitterstream?sort=-publicdate

These are tar files that contain bz2 compressed newline separated twitter events as json. These include deletion events as well, so you can for instance easily estimate the time an auto-deleter is set to.

Yes, they're huge archives, but you could still probably process a year of these for particular targets for under $10 on EC2.

Whilst I'm impressed with archive team's efforts, I would be surprised if there aren't some commercial twitter stream consumers that absolutely dwarf this.

Treat everything you put on twitter as public forever and you won't go too far wrong.